To our considerable surprise we have received several hundred emails on the
hypothetical testimony. Some of our answers can be seen by clicking the Comments
link to the right. A common query was 'have you translated the last two paragraphs
into languages other than those mentioned. If not, would you be interested in doing
so? '
The text referred to is
"For good and for ill, the American economy is highly interconnected all over the
globe. When we looked at the international consequences of inexorable decreases in
American purchases of imported petroleum the ramifications for countries like
Venezuela and Iran, to name a few, are considerable. Among others, an early 20th
century theoretician, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, pointed out that one could not make
an omelette without breaking eggs. We have every confidence that several clever
economists in Caracas and Tehran have already computed that the same geometry
applies: Venezuela, like many Caribbean countries, cannot keeping burning oil and
hoping that there is enough rain to provide hydroelectric power. The same problem
applies in southwestern Asia: after the oil runs out, then what? We would like it if
our children's children in improving American schools were taught Spanish and
Portuguese and Quechua and Aymara and Arabic and Farsi so engineers from the
United States could work internationally on joint ventured projects using the very
same sunlight. And we would like it even more if schools in two hundred countries
taught English and C++ so everyone there could read and understand how America
rebuilt itself.
We are willing to defend the geometric assertion that how strong any bounded
society such as a nation, state, county or school is can be measured by how it treats
its weakest."
We are, alas, not fluent in all 6,000 of the languages now spoken here on Planet
Earth. Thousands of them have no graphemic component, so writing them is a bit
tricky. Even when a language is writable [in this respect, meaning most browsers
will render correctly] finding a lexemic transformation - a human translator or a
mechanical dictionary - can be challenging. We have three requests for anyone
sending a translation or correcting a published translation:
1. identify the language - a SIL code would be great
2. note if a particular font is required
3. if you want to be informed if someone comments on your translation, let us know